Rendering deer tallow. Aka. deer fat

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your loved ones.   Mine was 2 days of wonderful food and lots of great catching up with family I have not seen in several months.

Along with Thanksgiving... hunting season in Wisconsin is upon us.   Several hunter friends graciously brought me their fat from butchering.  Deer fat makes amazing soap so it is well worth the effort in rendering it.  I promised several people I would document the process for them so let the tutorial begin...

First you will need to get yourself some deer tallow.  Here is a small load that I picked up a few days ago.  7 grocery bags full of tallow.

The next step is going to be the worst part.  It is the cutting process.  Normally I would grind all this in a grinder but mine seems to be hidden from me at the moment so hand cutting it is. You want your pieces to be small so they melt down efficiently.  Mine are not all that great but hey...  7 bags is a lot of cutting. haha

 The next step is tossing it all in a pan to cook.  I prefer a roaster so that I can control the temperature better. Put the lid on and let it cook. DO NOT ADD WATER TO THE CUT OF FAT.    I do dry rendering so I do not add water to the roaster.  I let it cook just like you would if you were making bacon.  Let all that fatty goodness melt down leaving nothing but bits of cracklin's. Now is the waiting game.   I suspect this young hunter has little experience in butchering so you can see that it is not the cleanest of fat.  But..  Beggers can't be choosers so.. here we go.   There is hair and other debris that I did not get out.. That is okay. It will all be gone in a few hours.  This is a lengthy process. 

This picture below is after about 2 hours of cooking.

  

This pitcher has some goo in it.  I scoop some fat out and pour it into a pitcher with hot water in it.  You do not want to shock the hot fat or the debris will solidify with the oil.  You can see the separation of fat and water.   There is a nice dark line separating them.  That dark line is excess cooked blood and meat that is being suspended in the water.  This is what we want.   After it solidifies I will pop it out of the pitcher, scrape the bottom of the block of fat to get some of the gunk off and put the fat into a pot for washing.  Washing is basically a simple process of combining oil with water so that all the debris in the oil will sink into the water rather than being suspended in the oil.  Hence the "washing" of tallow.  If it is super clean tallow you will have to wash it less.  The more meat and gunk the more washes it will take.  Some people also use baking soda in their wash water.   I try not to do this simply because you will need to keep washing until all the baking soda is out of it as well.   I choose not to use it unless it is a very stinky tallow.

This is after 3 washings.  Notice how the clean it looks.  But it will still need 1 more washing to be perfect.

Here is a stack of tallow that is waiting for its final washing.

 

This tall stack is sweating after bringing it in so I have towels to absorb the condensation.

 

This is a pad of tallow that is going into the pan for its 4th and final washing.  I use 16 ounces of water for each pan of tallow.   Once this one is done it will sit on a drying rack so that all the moisture is gone.  Then it will be melted down and placed into molds.  

Here is the cleaned tallow in smaller containers.   I like to mold them into 8 and 16 ounce blocks.  It makes it easier when soaping time comes about. You already know how much each block is going to weigh and it saves you from having to scoop (or chisel it) out of a huge bucket especially if you keep it in the freezer like I do.  After I weigh them out I pop them in the freezer until they are solid.

This is a stack of molded tallow that is just chillin' out waiting for the rest of the deer tallow to be molded and added to the pile for a final count.  The eight (8) on the left are all eight ounces.   The fifteen (15) on the right are all one pound blocks.   So.. with a ton more to go I already have nineteen (19) pounds of tallow this season.  I have more to pick up next week so hoping to have this batch all done today :)